In the centenary year of his death, one of the best letter writers in English receives his due in the hands of Stevenson authorities Booth (d. 1968) and Mehew. Eight volumes of letters will be published, restoring more than twice as many to print as we'd had heretofore. The first two volumes find Stevenson focusing on a quartet of correspondents: his mother; his artist cousin, Bob Stevenson; his friend Sidney Colvin, an art historian; and Mrs. Francis Sitwell (Stevenson's muse, with whom he had relations that seem to have veered close to the carnal, then off to the maternal). Stevenson disappoints his father by rejecting both a career in engineering and the family's orthodox Scotch Calvinism. Then, while recovering from illness (due in part, no doubt, to stress) on the French Riviera, he begins writing in earnest—first sketches, then essays, and finally tales. He's admitted to the Scottish bar (mostly to mollify his parents), but literary life leaves him no taste for the law, which he lets languish. On a visit to the Continent he meets his eventual wife, Fanny Osbourne, of Oakland, Calif. Stevenson's youthful letters to his mother may be the most remarkable of all- -travel notes, with every color of a sky and angle of a slope recorded: ``At the north of town stands Fort Charlotte, founded, as I hear, by Cromwell. It overhangs the water with a circuit of heavy grass grown walls, backed by mounds supported by ruinous buttresses and pierced by some four arched gateways. The sea-pink blooms thickly among the lichened crevices of the old stonework.'' With an admittedly ``elastic'' temper, his lows are low but never stiffen into a pose: ``On red-letter days, I manage to get enough excitement for a tolerably happy life.'' To read Stevenson gaining confidence in his art is to understand the humble yet unerring precision that invests all of his great fiction so memorably.
Pub Date: July 13, 1994
ISBN: 0-300-06023-8
Page Count: -
Publisher: Yale Univ.
Review Posted Online: May 19, 2010
Kirkus Reviews Issue: May 1, 1994
An autobiography as toxic and addictive as any drug its author has ever ingested.
The legendary booze-addled metal rocker turned reality-TV star comes clean in his tell-all autobiography.
Although brought up in the bleak British factory town of Aston, John “Ozzy” Osbourne’s tragicomic rags-to-riches tale is somehow quintessentially American. It’s an epic dream/nightmare that takes him from Winson Green prison in 1966 to a presidential dinner with George W. Bush in 2004. Tracing his adult life from petty thief and slaughterhouse worker to rock star, Osbourne’s first-person slang-and-expletive-driven style comes off like he’s casually relating his story while knocking back pints at the pub. “What you read here,” he writes, “is what dribbled out of the jelly I call my brain when I asked it for my life story.” During the late 1960s his transformation from inept shoplifter to notorious Black Sabbath frontman was unlikely enough. In fact, the band got its first paying gigs by waiting outside concert venues hoping the regularly scheduled act wouldn’t show. After a few years, Osbourne and his bandmates were touring America and becoming millionaires from their riff-heavy doom music. As expected, with success came personal excess and inevitable alienation from the other members of the group. But as a solo performer, Osbourne’s predilection for guns, drink, drugs, near-death experiences, cruelty to animals and relieving himself in public soon became the stuff of legend. His most infamous exploits—biting the head off a bat and accidentally urinating on the Alamo—are addressed, but they seem tame compared to other dark moments of his checkered past: nearly killing his wife Sharon during an alcohol-induced blackout, waking up after a bender in the middle of a busy highway, burning down his backyard, etc. Osbourne is confessional to a fault, jeopardizing his demonic-rocker reputation with glib remarks about his love for Paul McCartney and Robin Williams. The most distinguishing feature of the book is the staggering chapter-by-chapter accumulation of drunken mishaps, bodily dysfunctions and drug-induced mayhem over a 40-plus-year career—a résumé of anti-social atrocities comparable to any of rock ’n’ roll’s most reckless outlaws.
An autobiography as toxic and addictive as any drug its author has ever ingested.Pub Date: Jan. 25, 2010
ISBN: 978-0-446-56989-7
Page Count: 320
Publisher: Grand Central Publishing
Review Posted Online: May 19, 2010
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Dec. 1, 2009
IN THE NEWS
Stricter than, say, Bergen Evans or W3 ("disinterested" means impartial — period), Strunk is in the last analysis...
Privately published by Strunk of Cornell in 1918 and revised by his student E. B. White in 1959, that "little book" is back again with more White updatings.
Stricter than, say, Bergen Evans or W3 ("disinterested" means impartial — period), Strunk is in the last analysis (whoops — "A bankrupt expression") a unique guide (which means "without like or equal").Pub Date: May 15, 1972
ISBN: 0205632645
Page Count: 105
Publisher: Macmillan
Review Posted Online: Oct. 28, 2011
Kirkus Reviews Issue: May 1, 1972
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